Health information exchanges can result in healthcare cost-savings up to billions of dollars, according to research published in Information Systems Research.
A team of researchers collected annual data from 2003 through 2009. They compared average Medicare spending per beneficiary in healthcare markets with an operational HIE to markets that did not have an operational HIE.
They found markets with an HIE experienced average savings of $139 per Medicare beneficiary annually, which "equals a $3.12 billion annual reduction in spending if HIEs were to be implemented nationally in 2015 (the most recent year complete Medicare spending data was available)," said Idris Adjerid, a lead researcher and IT professor at the Mendoza College of Business at University of Notre Dame (Ind.).
Mr. Adjerid also noted, however, that reductions in spending is greater in markets where providers are offered financial incentives to use an HIE and where the HIEs have been around longer.
"We are the first to use nationally representative samples and robust approaches to show that HIEs are having a meaningful effect on health care spending," said Mr. Adjerid.